


Urban Exploration

by Zoya1416



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: AU because Jaget is not married here, M/M, Sex, Sharing a Shower, Some magic books, Urban Exploration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-16 09:58:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16083779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoya1416/pseuds/Zoya1416
Summary: Peter and Jaget take a trip under London and discover something about each other.





	Urban Exploration

My initial response to Jaget’s invitation was “No.” I had no intention of visiting London’s sewers again after participating in the first Anglo-American sewer luge team with him and Kimberley Reynolds. Then he waggled pictures in front of my eyes. Oval shaped sewers. Storm drains with three different kinds of brick arches in 100 yards. And all these lead to his centerpiece, a maze of wide tunnels, unknown age, with high iron arches. It had been built for something massive and permanent, but was now lost to memory.

‘I was hoping you could help me with these. I think they were storage tunnels, but for what I don't know.’ he said. ‘Some have brick walls, but they connect to metal ones—WWII type I think. And we can check out how long they seem to have been abandoned. There are wooden crates.’

‘Hmm.’ I said. It was another drizzly Saturday morning in August, and urban exploring wasn’t my favorite hobby. Jaget and I were in the breakfast room having coffee—Molly was okay with my making coffee, after I’d showed her several times I wouldn’t burn things. From her expressions, I wondered if she’d been afraid I’d heat up the pot with a fireball. I’d once brought her a picture of a lovely small footprint espresso machine but retreated as her eyes narrowed. Jaget took his coffee black, and smirked when I put in sugar and cream. I shrugged.  


“Black is for stakeouts or around other coppers when you don’t want to seem choosy. Cream and sugar at home. Don’t you have something planned with Shreya today?’  


He stared at the table. ‘We broke up two months ago.’  


‘Oh, I’m sorry.’  


‘Yeah. I dunno. We were—I thought we were getting along okay, but it wasn’t—great. My luck with women is pretty good,’ he said, side-eyeing me, ‘but I just don’t seem to—well, they don’t like—it’s not any one thing. Really.’ He finished loudly, and glanced up at me. I wondered if it it _was_ one thing, and he knew what it was, but didn't want to say. Probably not the same thing that kept coming between Bev and me.  


‘But you and Bev, you’re good, right?’ he said, swatting the ball back to me. How did we get into this conversation, I thought. Oh, yeah, me and my big mouth.  


‘No. We’re not. It’s off again. I—she says—always says, never mind, that I get distracted. That we start out great, but then I don’t call her, or text her back, or make plans to go out, or—she says I just don't make time to get to her house by her river, only place we can shag, anyway,’

He was staring in horror. ‘So you get too busy to shag your girlfriend, an actual goddess, is that what you just said?’

‘No! Not like that! Well, maybe, only it doesn’t seem—there are always cases, you know, and only the two of us, and sometimes they take a couple or three days, round the clock—’  


‘Man.’ Jaget shook his head. ‘I thought _I_ was the bad boyfriend.’  


‘Shut up. And why would I want to leave a perfectly nice warm house to go down your stupid tunnel, anyway?’ I looked over at him as he sat with one leg crossed over the other knee. He was wearing an Arsenal sweatshirt, good for him, and he was a nice-enough looking guy, why wouldn’t a girl want to be with him? He didn't look like the kind who would, hypothetically, cruise gay bars for random hookups after he'd left his girlfriend. Even if he left before he got picked up.

He shook himself, and then dangled another carrot. ‘I think some of this belongs to your lot anyway. There are books in one of the crates.’  


‘What kind of books?’ I said, suspicious.  


‘This kind.’ He pulled out a book with a Bodleian stamp. 

I grabbed it. It was pre WWII, alright, small but with tight bindings and in excellent condition. Opening it, I smiled. Nothing we needed to worry about. It was a compilation of traditional folk-magic spells, with the ingredients carefully detailed and lovingly illustrated. It wasn’t quite eye of newt, and toe of frog, but close. A beautiful little thing. I wasn’t sure whether Postmartin really wanted it back, or whether Nightingale thought it worthy of the mundane library, but it didn’t need to be in a deserted tunnel.  


‘How far away is this tunnel, exactly?’ I still didn’t want to be out in the rain, especially carrying back books.  


He smiled. ‘If we skip the bricks and dry sewers for another time, it won’t be 10 minutes. It’s underneath the Russell Square station.’  


‘Fuck yeah, I’m in.’ I pushed back my chair and stood up.‘You swear this is dry? We won’t need those waders?’  


He smiled a satisfied cat smile. ‘Just your oldest work boots. But I’ve got knee-high covers in my rucksack.’

He was right. It only took a few minutes walking down the Russell Square station before he pulled open a door in a small niche.

‘What if someone asks why we’re here?’ I asked, not thinking.  


He gave it the eye roll that deserved. ‘BTP, remember? My actual day job.’

The tunnel was dry, as promised, and there was a ladder down to the next level. Nothing unusual yet, but the 3rd ladder Jaget and I descended went much deeper. I had mostly got over my claustrophobia after the Oxford Circus earthbender catastrophe, but—‘How deep is this going?’  


Jaget motioned me down a completely black corridor, and then opened a side door.  


He flashed on his headlamp. We were in a space the size of a regular tube station, with carved metal arches seven meters high. The walls were brick—I thought much older than the metal arches. They’d repurposed an older sewer tunnel, I thought, and shifted the water completely away. It was obvious that it had been abandoned for years. 

‘I think it’s one of the purpose-built WWII civilian shelters,’ I said. ‘The ones they built to keep people from sheltering in the Underground.’  


‘I think so too. But the door was sealed’—I looked at him.  


‘Alright, I had to pry a bit and work out how to unlock it, you saw I didn’t break the door,’ he said with a snort. ‘The doors at the other end are huge, locked with padlocks, and I wouldn’t known where to start with them.’

So Jaget had a little law-breaking tinge to his make-up. Probably had to after his normally uneventful BTP career. We wandered on. This station had several branching rooms—for different families? I wondered. Were black and whites separated here, underground, too? They probably were, but at least there were no offensive signs. No signs for toilets, either, and I asked Jaget.  


‘I have no idea when this was abandoned. Maybe they planned to build them in later?’

Not if there weren’t already plumbing connections in place, I thought, and then I stopped thinking. There were crates in one room, fifteen, twenty, maybe more, stacked up to three high, but all jumbled, no order to them. They were wooden, they were unbroken, except for one—I glared at Jaget, but he shrugged.  


‘I wasn’t going to steal anything, just wanted to see what they were.’  


The one he’d opened was indeed full of books, but only a few had Bodleian stamps. The others—many were unmarked at all, but some had the Folly’s own stamp. I recognized several.

‘They’re copies from the mundane library,’ I said. ‘The library for books about magic, not the magic books. You can tell, because most of these are in English.’ I showed him several. ‘Duplicates, some of them—some of these may have never been catalogued at all because they weren’t supposed to be anything unusual. It looks like they were just dumped here, which is odd, because the Folly has plenty of room.’

But it hadn’t during the interwar years, I thought, when the Folly was full of wizards, more servants, extra supplies for food, laundry, towels, sheets; pens and pencils, notebooks-extra staves? Maybe a few ordinary boxes of books had been dragged to the underground station—by mistake? Was someone supposed to carry them on somewhere? Someone not a wizard, maybe one of the harried staff; and maybe not aware of what was in the boxes at all. And was killed in the bombing, or called up, or—somehow they’d all been forgotten, like the station itself. How had they been hidden—was it glamour, and how long did glamours last anyway? But we were clearly the first to open them, and I was glad Jaget had found it and asked me to come.

‘I’ll have to see how Nightingale and I can organize getting them. There are too many to even get one box out by ourselves. It’s going to take some movers and a lorry.’

He nodded, doubled over, and picked up one more book. I took it automatically, and we headed back. He really did have a nice bum, I thought. Firm, rounded, muscular, probably from all that walking. Bollocks.There was the mental snap of "there you go again. That’s the reason Beverley doesn’t know about, or maybe doesn’t know about, or I hope she doesn’t know at any rate." I forced my mind to stay away from unknowable things. Then at the next to top level there was a small storm sewer, and it had filled up a foot while we explored.  


I glared at Jaget, who shrugged. ‘Wasn’t wet before, I thought they were all blocked. It didn’t look like it had been wet, or not in a long time.’  


Storm sewers aren’t nearly as nasty as sewage ones, of course, but there was plenty of ordinary muck, grime, and trash that was already sweeping through. We slogged. It was full-on storming when we got back to the street, and I yelped. It was August, but still cold.

Jaget looked particularly miserable. His black hair clumped onto his skull immediately, and he hadn’t picked more than a light jacket to  
wear. He started shivering.

‘Want to come back to the Folly?’ I yelled, over a burst of thunder. ‘We can wash off, and my clothes just about fit you.’  


We hurried back, and I started thinking, yeah, he’s about my size, a little shorter, bulkier in the shoulder, definitely, but shorter legs. Definitely shorter, very muscular. A little darker than me, but with those deep-set eyes some Asians have. Shit.

We kicked off our work boots at the back door, then scarpered up to the third floor.  
‘At least I’ve got a proper shower for you now,’ I said.

Jaget stared at the not-that-large claw-footed white porcelain bath. ‘Just a bathtub? No shower? Was this some type of torture for apprentices?’

‘I have no idea. Just that they weren’t usual when the Folly was built, and then there was nobody—there were no apprentices—for a long time.’

I had the previous winter finally told Nightingale I would pay for a shower installation, half up front, if he would let me take the rest out of my pay. He frowned.

‘It’s—sir, it’s been five years, and it’s going on winter, and I don’t think I could—anyway, I would really appreciate it if you’ll let me put one in.’

‘What kind did you have in mind?’ he said, surprising me, and I showed him what I’d been thinking of. A month later it was in place, all taken care of by Folly accounts.

Jaget walked over to the shower and whistled. ‘This is quite the upgrade.’ He checked out my dual headed shower spray with the hand sprayer, the independent thermostat setters, the several niches for shower soaps and shampoos, the nice deep shower bench—  
‘Bet that comes in handy—or it would, never mind, you’ve got those force fields, don’t you.’

I refused to speculate on what he might mean.  


‘At least it doesn’t have all the same gadgets as the Archchancellor’s,’ he laughed. He was as much a Discworld geek as I was.  


‘Yeah, definitely not.’  


‘Not the Geyser?’ he asked, possibly innocently.  


‘No, yeah, not that one.’  


‘The Archchancellor said he’d “never felt cleaner,”’ and there was a definite something to Jaget’s expression. A smirk? Some kind of change in his eyes. He looked away. No, this was my imagination.

‘Here, guests go first.’  


‘And am I the first guest?’ A drawl in his voice, pitched lower than normal. I was becoming suspicious that my speculations were right.  


‘Get your damn clothes off or I’ll change my mind.’

‘Okay,’ Jaget said and he stripped off his socks. Then he reached for the hem of his shirt. He held my eye as he slowly began to pull it over his head. I was dry-mouthed by the time he got he got the damn shirt off, which seemed to take a ridiculous amount of time. I still wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to misunderstand here, not the kind of thing to make mistakes about. He continued to hold my eye as he reached for his belt, then his zipper—and he must’ve wondered by then why I didn’t look away—he would have gotten angry already if—and I had to know, I had to know.

Then he dropped his eyes and scanned me lazily, all the way down and back up again. Not a mistake. Oh fuck me, not a mistake. Then he grinned and said, ‘Peter, why do you still have so many damn clothes on?’

I inhaled with relief, stepped closer and reached for his waist.  


‘Well, you see, I was going to be good and let you have the first shower.’  


‘Are you going to be good now?’  


‘Fuck no,’ I said, and kissed him.  


God, how good it felt to touch him, to know that he wanted what I did. He was open-mouthed in the first instant, tongue flicking around inside, not jamming it down. I’ve never liked that, never do that, don’t like a tonsil plunge the first time. Fuck, how good to find someone who was with me on that. I broke off to kiss under his jaw, along his neck, and he pulled at my shirt.

‘You weren’t listening,’ he hissed. ‘All of this, now.’  


I reached for the zip he still had only halfway down, pulled it all the way, and him out of his pants--he was half-hard already--then stroked.

‘Right this instant? Right this instant? Because I can quit if’—  


He yanked my arse close and snaked the other hand under my shirt and up my chest. Damn, cold hands, but he stroked across my pecs and onto a nipple and—I shivered, not only with pleasure. Right, what was I doing with this nice lovely shower right next to us?  


I pulled my hand away from him and stripped my clothes in some kind of record. He was in the shower getting the temperature right before I was bare. He tugged me by the shoulders, pulled me close with a knee between my thighs. I laughed, then kissed him again, more tongue this time. I reached behind him for the soap.  


‘You’re kidding me!’ he said, when I began to scrub his broad shoulders.

  
‘Nope. Want to make sure you’re clean after all that dirty, dirty wading.’  


‘Fuck.’ But I got the soap down across those shoulders, down his back, and onto his arse without any more complaints, and then he grabbed the sponge.  


‘Fair turn.’ He quickly washed me as well, and then I took his beautiful cock, darker than his skin, darker than mine, into my hand again and got him slippery with soap. He pulled me into the quick same rhythm and it was—we were wet and warm from the shower spray, we were wet and warm between us, he had smooth skin and was firm and so was I. The water continued to beat warm across us. I could come very quickly.

Then he let go of me—I started to complain—he sat down on the shower bench and rinsed me quickly.  


‘Get the damn spray out of my eye.’  


I did, I turned down the spray until it was like a gentle stream over us.

He looked up and caught my eyes again. 'I’ve wanted to do this to you for so long.’

I rested my hands on his shoulders. ‘How long?’  


‘Oh, since the time before last when Beverley broke up with you. But I didn’t have any idea you—and I still didn’t until today’—  


‘Yeah, me neither. That’s one of the things Bev kept breaking up with me about. We’d be doing fine, and then she'd say I was inattentive. I was, because I'd started checking out a guy, although I don't think she ever caught me, and then’—  


And then he had my cock in his mouth, sucking and flicking his tongue around the head. I’d never had a guy go down on me, and it—somehow a guy knew what would get me wound up faster. Of course, I thought with the last bit of my science brain, guys know what gets them off, so probably you could do a study with a girl and then a guy sucking the same guy and see the ratings—that thought lasted only about 15 seconds, because that was when my hips went tighter. I squeezed Jaget’s shoulders, and he pulled off, but then put a lovely warm hand on me to stroke me as I came. 

The shower bench was wide enough for two—I’d checked the model—and I sagged against Jaget. Cleaning up was easy, but I wasn’t sure I could get my knees to cooperate enough to figure out how to get him off. He solved it for me, tapping me on the cheek.

‘Don’t you have a bed around here someplace?’

‘Yeah, grab a towel and come on.’

We stumbled down the corridor and I threw my door back. I walked Jaget over to the bed, sat down with him and then laid him down against the pillow. 

I wanted to make this as good for him as he had done for me and I started kissing him again--on his mouth first, on the stubble of his jaw—he stretched his arms up lazily to hold the rungs of my headboard, oh fuck, and I had to stop to look at him. Dark hair under his arms, not too much on his chest, but some in a line heading down. His eyes were closed and his lips were wet. I broke away to grab the lube from my bedside table. I spread it onto my hand and then circled my fingers around his dick. It was as good as it had been in the shower. I'd never done this with another man, but I knew I didn't like to be yanked. Just up and down, moving easily but holding him tight. I planned to go down, but I wanted him to enjoy being as hard as he could when I slid onto him. But he said something like ‘nnnggghh..’ when I first touched him, and sprawled a bit, so I tongued a nipple, and kissed down his chest to his waist, and then he started fucking my hand. Right, this was good too, would he like—I moved a thigh over his, pinning him gently—letting him feel that increased pressure, did he like that?—I could go down on him the next time—meanwhile how did I make this as good for him—then I didn't need to think about it more as he came apart under me.  


I had flannels in my bedside table, so I reached for one and started cleaning him off.  


‘Damn, Peter,’ he said groggily, ‘if I had any idea I could seduce you with another trip down the tunnels’—  


‘And the books, the books were important too.’  


‘—and take you down the tunnels, I would have gotten you for a bricks and grope tour sooner.’

‘Unsanitary.’ We would still have had to shower.’  


I shut up because he’d fallen asleep.  


Right. Next time I’d fuck him before we went into the tunnels. He’d mentioned some interesting bricks—I fell asleep as well.

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as, I thought, maybe 500 words of porn. Just them in the shower with soapy, slippery dicks. Now because I am a nerd, I have these tabs open: pictures of London sewers and tunnels with different types of brick, and also the large abandoned storage area described here; common names for Indian women; checking on name Shreya for no surprises;small footprint espesso machine; witches' quote from Macbeth; and shower models and features X four pages. This does not count time on a London map spent figuring out which River the interesting bricks belonged to, and did Peter need to do anything for them, and which Underground stop was nearest the Folly. Just the little things.
> 
> The link to the tunnel storage rooms pics:
> 
> https://goo.gl/images/gCDLuS


End file.
